After 22 years at Apple, Santa Clara County woman becomes solar power entrepreneur

Margie Sanchez’s business is headquartered in her garage, where she builds custom solar screens to improve energy efficiency.

The air is sticky as Margie Sanchez, dressed casually in jeans and a loose-fitting floral print shirt, scoots around her worktable to a pair of power saws. Cutting utensils, mallets and measuring tools are scattered about a central worktable as Sanchez dons her work goggles and begins cutting a thin strip of aluminum.

Sanchez’s garage, nestled on a residential street in San Jose’s Alum Rock community, serves as a one-woman manufacturing center for her company, California Solar Screens, which makes exterior screens for homes.

The location, where the only distractions are Sanchez’s two small dogs, seems an unlikely workplace for someone who worked at Apple for 22 years.

But as Sanchez moves around her workspace, pulling out screens and excitedly pointing to their structural intricacies, her passion for the product is apparent. Should she have stayed with Apple? After all, at 58, she’s nearing retirement.

Certainly her life would be more secure and certain than it will be as an entrepreneur. But Sanchez shrugs off the notion that she should have stayed with the safe path. Read More >>